Just another WordPress.com site

Main menu

Post navigation

Because You Stopped for Store Brand Moisturizer

When you are late getting home from work. When you text at 4:36 that you will be home in twenty and then it is 5:23, I slowly but at lightening speed think, “Is this the day that I will lose her?” I seize up like an epileptic, which is something that I’m not. My bones assemble into the steel silhouette of a building that will soon be selling chicken fried rice and pretty cranberry colored but quite itchy sweaters. I sing a little to myself, not at all like a dirge but more like the kind of song I might listen to in the morning while I’m brushing my teeth before work, “So these things happen. Carry on. Pull your muscles out of your pockets.” I will honor your memory and a life beautifully, really, just beautifully lived, and I will make sure sprays of flowers adorn your coffin. I will ask people, please, please don’t speak of her in the past tense. I will push open the screen door into a porch busy with blustery wind, like I am trudging and pushing through a desert- which I am- and I will take glass dishes holding wet piles of chicken and vegetables cut into tiny logs, all mixed up with gelatinous canned soup. I will hold the dishes like sleeping babies and smile graciously. People will ask how I am holding up. I will try not to hand the well wishers a blue lipped smile- you knew my blue lips and they made you worry that I was dead but it is you who is dead- and eyeballs caught up in fine red nets. I will accept hugs from people wearing knee length, loosely belted sweaters. They know how hard this must be. Tears hang off our eyelids like perched skydivers. In the middle of the night, I will vomit into a white toilet bowl. I will leave the lights off because this makes the retching more poignant. The smell of vomit will bloom over the ceramic tiles, and I will think somewhere in my body, look at you. You are grieving. Look at how well you’re doing this. I will crawl across the carpet on my knees, wasted, a snazzy skeleton. I will liken myself to some biblical creature. I will lift myself into our bed like I am a truck bed of cargo, and I will peel away my clothes like shells. I will hear birds in the black trees and I will ride their backs, humping their thin spines to urge them on, away from my frame of bones spread over the sheets that have grown furry without washing since you died three plus weeks ago. By which I mean two months. Four months. We never had it together, but how we turned like one animal in our dirt.